Home, sweet home….

After 9 months in our temporary space, CTSI has finally returned to our (newly renovated) office on the 4th floor of Robarts! There are still some boxes to unpack and construction is still on-going but we are ready and open for business. We’ve already held workshops in the Blackburn Room and computer lab and welcomed instructors and graduate students into our new offices and meeting rooms. It didn’t take long to settle in – and we’re doing our best to keep out of the way of the construction crew finishing up the final details. We look forward to celebrating our new space with our colleagues!

Our new reception area...

Our new meeting rooms come with sunshine.

Blackburn Room

While, we are excited to set up shop in our bright and shiny new space, I will be sad to say goodbye to a few things from the 7th floor.

Ye Olde Card Catalogue
Our office is divided down a firm line: those of us who are nostalgic about library card catalogues and those who have never used one, never seen one before arriving on the 7th floor and have no idea how to use one. (I haven’t asked if this latter group is also unfamiliar with dot matrix printers and rotary dial phones because I’m not sure if I want to know the answer.) Apparently, the bank of cards were no longer used even before I arrived in the late 80s. (When I arrived at U of T to start my undergraduate degree, the catalogue was computerized. We searched for books using terminals in the library, which seemed very futuristic to me. You can imagine, then, how impressed I was when a housemate hooked his computer to the phone line and accessed the library catalogue from his room. We could research a topic from the comfort of his room! It felt very War Games and top secret.) I like to think that my father rooted through these cards when he was completing his undergraduate degree in the early 50s. They were a nice – and tangible – tie to U of T’s past. I liked flipping through the cards, hoping to finding a handwritten one or one with comments. It was comforting to think that many of the books could still be found in the stacks.

Does anyone even use index cards any more?

The Live Action Angry Birds Game
…. even though it never really got off the ground. We did our best to make use of ackwardly placed cubicles and masking tape, turning space (well, my cubicle to be exact) into a target zone for incoming stuffed birds. Points were awarded according to how close birds landed to the centre. We established a few rules – you had to be sitting in a chair, you had to be behind ‘the line’, you had to warn me with a call of ‘incoming!’ – and kept score on a white board. Unfortunately, the competition didn’t last much past our first few weeks in the space. I kept the tape on the floor, though, just in case there was a sudden need. My new space is more ‘put together’ so no more angry birds. We’re all fine with that, though. We’re busy personalizing our new spaces and getting ready for another fall of workshops (and workshops), the symposium and whatever else the new school year may bring.

My new 4x6 home....